Throwing a few comments over the wall

•This makes me incredibly nostalgic!

•The roses are in bloom. So nice.

•Don't use L'Oreal RevitaLift Night cream. I was foolish and vain and I bought some. It gave me a nasty case of perioral dermatitis that I'm still trying to get rid of. I left a nastygram on their corporate web site, but haven't heard back yet...although part of the problem might be that I made it clear I didn't want coupons for more of their products. :-)

Update: They refunded my money! As in, they actually cut me a check. I have to admit I'm rather impressed.

Oh, and Diana, I haven't even managed to get to the drugstore to pick up some hydrocortisone yet, but a mild salicylic acid exfoliator, plus a light allergy-tested moisturizer, has helped bring things back to normal. I'm still afraid to wear makeup, but I'll get there.

Intermission

I appear to be on hiatus. I am having a wonderful spring (as I hope you all are), but I don't seem to have a thing to say. Look for me in your comment boxes! xx

Yay

I actually voted for an American Idol contestant this week. It was Carly Smithson. I thought her version of "Here You Come Again" was one of the best performances I'd heard on the show, so I was predictably enraged by Simon's damning-with-faint-praise review.

She wasn't even in the bottom three. Ha! I did my job.

Carly sometimes doesn't come off cute or friendly on TV. She's a little too earnest and has a tendency to overshare at awkward moments. And she can be a little prickly, too. I think that's why I identify with her so strongly; I see myself in her. I joked with the s.o. that my vote was on behalf of all of the people like me and Carly out there--we need to hang together! We are lovely, kindhearted people who lack schnuggly wuggly squeezability. :-)

Speaking of schnuggly wuggly squeezability, David Archuleta and his entire family can take a long walk off a short pier. I was utterly repulsed when I saw him on one of the TV Guide channel's AI-related programs. They asked all the contestants what they did with their first paycheck. His answer? His family took his winnings from a kiddie pageant and gave it to his grandmother so she could make her rent. Of course that's a wonderful thing to do, but couldn't the family have helped grandma out without putting all that weight and responsibility directly on their kid's shoulders? (Maybe they could have used some of the money they spent hauling their son around to precocious-kid competitions!) With his psycho stage family, he's going to turn out to be Michael Jackson. Lindsay Lohan if he's lucky.

My feelings about the contestants overall haven't evolved much since the beginning. I do think that Jason Castro has failed to live up to his potential. Conversely, Michael Johns seems to learn and evolve each week--he just gets better and better. And David Cook exceeds all expectations. I wouldn't mind seeing him win the whole thing.

The gleaners

For some reason I find this incredibly cute:

The s.o. is tilling one of the chicken runs for replanting. At first, all the chickens ran for cover--the tiller is a loud beast. But gradually they re-emerged, and now there is a little flock of brave chickens following the tiller and scratching out all the bugs and grubs that it exposes.

Hee.

Late bunny

I have been meaning to post this photo for exactly as many days as you might infer. I was thrilled with my easter-egg stylings this year (I almost wrote "this ear," which is fitting for a lagocentric holiday). Note the use of the eggs' natural colors: the light blue is overdyed with half dark blue, and the pinky-brown is overdyed with half red. The solid color ones are mostly bantam eggs, which are the only white eggs we have.



Larjmarj at Knizzle fo Shizzle posted about the most amazing egg-dyeing process, which I think I'll try next year. Can you believe the gorgeous patterns? The only downside is that the dyes are emphatically not edible. But then again, the s.o. won't eat the ones I dyed using trusty Badia food dyes, claiming that he can taste the difference. So no great loss, then.

I haven't made any hot cross buns yet. With the holiday coming so early this year, it doesn't seem timely. I'll do it in a week or two, maybe.

This dose of spring has been brought to you by 10 Signs Like This, putting the Eostre back in Easter since 2004.

Alarming

I can't say I didn't know that the south was part of Tornado Alley. After all, east Nashville was stomped by the giant boot of Mother Nature just a couple of years before I moved there. Last year, too, when I was driving back from the Georgia Organics conference, I saw the splinter-embedded remains of a neighborhood that had been hit.

But I have to admit that I am sobered by yesterday's weather. I'm a little fearful, too, because even though last night's storms brought our town nothing but thunder and lightning and rain, there's another day to go before the system clears. Strong possibility of...well, a whole laundry list of things, according to the National Weather Service. Maybe even oobleck.

I'm pretty sure that nature doesn't take requests, but just in case I'm wrong, here are two:

(1) No more tornadoes please, and secondarily,
(2) No hail on my rental car please!

Kthxbai.

Ephemeral

Every spring I forget to take pictures of the amazing Bradford pear trees in our town, so this year I decided to remedy the situation. Now I know there's nothing great about a monoculture, and yes, I'm sure it would have been better if our mayor had chosen to plant native species along the right-of-way instead. But have you ever seen a mile of Bradford pears in full bloom? A full mile. I saw my friend Tara on her morning walk while I was taking these photos, and she didn't think I was crazy for doing it. She just said "It's beautiful. It looks like it snowed."





For the record, this is all across the street from our house. It's yet another reason why I love where we live.

We had a really awful day yesterday. My favorite goose, the small female, died. She had been sick for a little more than a day and then died in her sleep. She had been making a horrible crunching sound inside her throat, and she wouldn't eat, although we were able to get her to take some water. It sounded as though she might have damaged her trachea in some way. We're pretty sure (and very hopeful) that it wasn't something communicable.

I will miss her terribly--she was the only one who would let us pet her. What a sad turn of events. I hope she knew that we tried to do what we could for her.

To top off a perfectly rotten day, my car broke down when I was in town on errands. By "broke down" I mean "stalled out in traffic and nearly got me killed." It's something electrical that's going to cost us $500, plus the fees for the rental car I had to borrow until Monday. One nice thing I can say, though, is that the people at the Toyota dealership in Athens are really helpful and dog-friendly. I had Silver with me, and they never gave me a moment's guff about having her in the waiting room, in the rental area, in the rental car. In fact, a salesman came and played with her for a while, and they made sure I knew where to get her some water and where to take her for a walk. They even apologized for being out of dog biscuits. She repaid them for their niceness by being very polite and doing tricks for the mechanic.